I’d not seen the woman before. She must have arrived by the front gangway, one of several latecomers to Farid’s party. Perhaps she was Bahaddin’s new girl or something and yet, besides the interest which Farid, like everyone else, was taking in this wild dance — which had really become an act, clearing most of the other dancers off the small floor — there was as well in his wrinkled urbane face a distinct measure of distaste as he watched their antics; Farid looked at the woman as if she, as well as her dancing, were out of place. There was no good-humoured understanding in his consideration of the spectacle — an attitude he might well have taken, as he had before, in the high spirits of his birthday guests; she might have been an unpleasant stranger to him and I thought simply, remembering Farid’s real proclivities in sexual matters and Bahaddin’s good looks, “He’s jealous of her. She’s snapped up Bahaddin before he’d got his hand in. He’s the angry suitor. He shouldn’t have asked her.”
The woman — girl really, she hardly looked twenty — could have been Italian or Greek, not Egyptian, with her long, sharply triangular features and dark hair parted down the middle; a classic strangely formal face, childlike and unmarked, bland and empty in a way, like a photograph taken before first communion or a Renaissance virgin in the Uffizi. And yet it was she who led the dance, encouraging Bahaddin to ever greater flights, always one step ahead of him.
Henry had joined us and we sat round the table we’d booked on the opposite side of the deck to Farid’s party, next to the river wall.
“Who is she?”
“No idea. Not one of Farid’s friends. He’d never risk inviting someone so attractive. One of the girls with the orchestra perhaps. She’s quite something.”
People had come out of the bar and had crowded round the floor, several deep, thinking the cabaret had started early, so that we had to stand up to see the last tumultuous flourish of the dance. Their hands linked across the floor together, the girl was spinning Bahaddin round in circles like a weight at the end of a piece of string — his face quite without expression, his body so relaxed, inert, that its animation seemed due to centrifugal force alone and not to any muscular process. The music finally exhausted itself in a long crescendo of chords and drums. But the two figures spun on in silence afterwards, only gradually losing momentum, unwilling to release themselves from what appeared now as an intensely private affair, not connected with the music or the place. At last they stopped, faced each other for a moment in surprise, like strangers, standing quite still — and then, taking no account of the applause which broke over the deck, they disappeared among the press of people on the far side of the floor.
“What on earth got into Bahaddin? Was he drunk? He didn’t look it,” Bridget asked and the people drifted away and the band mopped their faces, looking pleased and super-cilious as if they, and not the girl, had been the reason for this outburst of enthusiasm.
“Who is she?” someone asked at the next table.
We could see Farid’s party now but she wasn’t there. Bahaddin had his back towards us and was sitting next to an elderly European lady who seemed to be congratulating or berating him without receiving the smallest flicker of a response.
The orchestra broke into a ragged version of “Happy Birthday” and everyone at Farid’s table stood up, glasses in hand, and toasted the beaming figure at the end, now fully restored in his traditional self-satisfied humour. They mouthed the ridiculous words with embarrassment, for they hardly knew them, so that the old lady had to lead the song, like a matron at Sunday school. I supposed that Farid had once had some service of her — as an entrée to a sexual opportunity among the English community in the old days perhaps — and that thus, unwittingly, she had been numbered among his guests this evening. And I was wondering about this when I saw her trying to manhandle Bahaddin to his feet.
For everyone had stood up except Bahaddin.
Instead, with the old lady’s prodding, he fell across the table like a happy drunk. And because we all thought this to be the case, that drink and exhaustion had taken him, and seeing the waiters help him indoors, we thought nothing of it until fifteen minutes later.
Henry and I were with Farid when Mustafa came up to tell us that Bahaddin looked more than drunk. And he did. When we got to the cabin amidships he was quite obviously dead.
“My God. At my birthday party. Are you sure?” And Farid looked at us hopefully, humming something light-hearted under his breath, as if there were still some small chance that the evening’s entertainment might yet be saved.
“How can you be sure?” he continued desperately. Henry told him to shut up.
They had opened Bahaddin’s frilly collar and he lay on the bare coiled springs of an immense brass bedstead with Farouk’s initial worked in gilded metal above his head. The cabin had been part of the king’s private quarters and was now used as an office and a store room so that Bahaddin lay surrounded by crates of whisky and wine and piles of tablecloths which had been thrown off the bed on his arrival. One of Farid’s assistants sat at his desk, talking to the police, apparently unaware that Bahaddin was dead, for he kept on mentioning the word “drunk”.
“Yes, completely drunk, passed out. Can you send someone round to take him off? Yes — the Prince. Bahaddin. Yes, I’ll be careful. No. Just too much to drink.” He turned to look at the little group round the bed as if to confirm this last point but Henry had moved to block his view. He looked at me briefly and then nodded towards the door. Farid was still fussing round the body, pinching Bahaddin’s cheeks, slapping his face, vigorously massaging his chest — as if his life, and not Bahaddin’s, depended on it. He was almost in tears.
“My God — what will I do? He cannot be dead!” He might have been his father.
“Just stay here, Farid. Ill get a doctor.” And we left the room.
“Get Bridget off the boat. Go to the Gezira Club. I’ll join you there. Don’t wait. Hurry — move.”
I picked up Bridget and we got off the boat moments before a police car swung off the bridge behind us and turned into the Gezira corniche.
“What’s happened to Bahaddin? What’s going on?”
“He’s dead. I don’t know how. Henry’s going to meet us at the Club.”
“No. That’s nonsense. Let’s go back.” She spoke seriously, precisely, as if I were drunk and playing some stupid prank. She turned and we both looked back at the boat. Already the police had barred both gangways, a second car had arrived with plainclothesmen and the music had stopped: there was a confused angry murmur of voices, the sounds of orders and imprecations. We walked on briskly towards the Club.
It struck me how quick and efficient the police had been in getting to the boat — just for a drunk. And then I remembered that it was a dead drunk and the implications were suddenly clear: I’d come to see Bahaddin in several ways: as a friend, as an engaging part of the city’s décor — the eternal playboy always doing his “O” levels, suitably weary, almost middle-aged; as head prefect at Maadi, taking assembly, going in first to bat, sharing his endless packets of Player’s with me late at night in my room; Bahaddin with his suite on the top floor of the Cosmopolitan and his many wives back home. And that was the clue, the thing about him I’d quite forgotten: Bahaddin, the scion of one of the great families of Islam, heir to one of the richest thousand square miles in the world, to an ancient kingdom whose strategic, financial and moral position in the Middle East was of vast importance to Nasser in his bid for leadership of that world.